Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts) Page 9

  “You shouldn’t be.”

  “I got her the Bone Tree. I—”

  “You know my sister by now. You know how determined she is. She would’ve gotten it one way or another. And my father—” His next inhale comes sharp. “Vetris has no idea how to fight against valkerax. No one does. No one but the Old Vetrisians, and they’re long dead and gone.”

  “The beneathers,” I try.

  He thinks about it, then nods. “If we could get their aid—if I could speak to the ancestor council, I might persuade them. But—”

  His shoulders faintly shake. Gingerly, I raise my hand to him, warm skin on warm skin.

  “But what?” I press.

  “It takes twelve beneathers to take down just one valkerax. And a majority of them die in the process. They’re strong, immune to fire. The human death toll to kill just one…it’s not feasible. The sheer amount of valkerax we saw with Varia that day on the mountain—there’s too many of them. Even with the beneathers’ help.”

  “But we can try,” I say. “Maybe—when we explain to the High Witches what’s going on, they’ll want to help. And then we get the beneathers, and what’s left of the Cavanosian army, and maybe the Helkyrisian armada, and together—”

  “It’s just the four of us.” He sighs. “We can’t remake the old concordats. That was a thousand years ago—and it took decades of valkerax violence before the Mist Continent caved and made them.”

  “But we can try,” I stress.

  My hand slides down, and he captures it with his, bringing it to his lips. Featherlight, still, molten beneath the satin sheen of water.

  “Just for a night,” he murmurs against my palm. “Just for one night, I don’t want to think about it. Is that…selfish of me?”

  My laugh is half breath, all nerves. “You’re allowed to be selfish once in a while, Your Highness.”

  His eyes dart up to mine, the unspoken future written out, chosen by my word choice. Choices, made one by one, to bring me standing here, in a starlit pool with the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.

  I reach my free hand out to his left one, wanting so badly to interlace our fingers. He’s looking at me with so much softness, but his hand doesn’t move. Doesn’t give. It just hangs there, my fingers working into his clumsily. Doesn’t he feel it?

  He glances down, and I see his eyes widen. But still, his fingers don’t move.

  “Is…is something wrong?” I ask.

  “No.” He pulls his hand out of mine. “I’m just tired.”

  Cold, slow horror crawls into my lungs. The teleportation of the four of us from the airship all the way into the village. And then the water snake, winding and enormous.

  “Lucien, your magic—”

  Suddenly, he pulls his whole body away from mine, and his hawk eyes harden. “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?” I step in, the water feeling like tar. “What else makes you lose function in your body? Surely you weren’t poisoned when I wasn’t looking?”

  Lucien turns, bracing his hands on the rock wall like he’s going to pull himself out of the pool. But he just hovers there, clutching on to the harsh, wet rock, to the cracks and crevices of it, one hand limper than the other.

  “You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” A plead tinges my voice, and it’s so strange. Uncomfortable and pinching like a brand-new pair of shoes.

  “It’s my magic,” he asserts softly.

  “You’re my witch,” I fire back. “I’m your Heartless. It’s my magic, too.”

  He falls silent at that, and I watch the water ripple around the small of his torso with a helplessness bubbling in my veins.

  “You said,” I start, “that whatever I choose, you’d still love me. So I’m telling you now: whatever you choose, I’ll still love you. But I won’t stand by and watch you hurt yourself over and over. You’ve done that enough for the both of us.”

  He’s quiet, and then he tilts his head barely over his shoulder, nose and mouth strong. “There’s no other way to stop her.”

  “There might be. You don’t know that for sure.”

  “I know that when the time comes, I’ll have to fight her,” he says. “Witch to witch. And the thought terrifies me.”

  “She—she won’t kill you—”

  “No. But I might kill her.”

  A thousand weights settle on my chest in an instant. His own sister. The sister he looked up to so fervently, the sister he missed so dearly. The sister who grew up with him, who looked after him. Family. If I could remember what family meant…would I fight them? Knowing I might have to kill them?

  No. Not in a million years.

  From somewhere completely unknown, I fish up the courage to speak. “It’d be different, I suppose, if you hated her.”

  His laugh is the bitter, quiet kind. “Yes. It would be.”

  I wade over, ungraceful and uncaring and desperate to touch him. To make things right. Or even just a little righter. I wrap my arms around him, pressing all of me into his back to let him know I’m here. Always.

  “I’m sorry.” I say the only thing I can say. His voice this time is hoarse, and on the verge. Of what, I have no idea. I might never know. But I don’t need to know.

  All I need to do is be here.

  “As am I.”

  7

  THE IRON LADY

  AND THE

  STARVING WOLF

  A dream again.

  I’m— No.

  Not me, her.

  Varia’s standing on a beach, me inside her body and looking out. I’ve never seen the ocean, or if I have in my past human life, I can’t remember it. Those memories are sealed in my heart. It’s water, so much water, but it’s wide and wild and pulsing like living steel edged white.

  She stands on a gray-sand beach and looks out at the ocean. She can feel it calling, a faint bell with only one word, getting louder.

  destroy.

  destroy.

  destroy.

  This world must be destroyed.

  She looks down at her hands, at her wood fingers and fine nails. She hates the world, and it should all be destroyed. Every last unfair bit of it. No! She doesn’t. She loves it. She loves…a girl. But which girl? Mousy hair, blue eyes, but her features are lost. Lost in the sea of burning and ravaging and breaking.

  destroy.

  The voice is the hunger, and it is not. It’s the inverse, the opposite, the void where there is presence. It is a voice without sound, thought without intention. It’s a hunger stranger than mine. Different than mine and yet the same. It wants us to be the worst we can be, always.

  Our black hair whips around our face, the sea breeze brutal, and we watch it be brutal to the water. To the world.

  Beneath the torrid waves, white manes rise like shark fins.

  I wake up with a headache and a looming sense of dread. Varia. No mistaking it this time. That was Varia, what she was seeing. But why can I see through her? Why only in dreams? And why is she standing on a beach, staring?

  Staring at what?

  I think about telling Lucien and Fione and Mal. But then I get a horrifying thought—if I can see through her, can she see through me? Am I endangering everyone? Again? But I have to stop her. I have to stay with them and stop her.

  All I can do is put my boots on, one lace at a time.

  The village is sorry to see us go.

  They stand at the edge of the ruin that was once their home, a nauseating mixture of mud and blackened char squelching beneath so many pairs of boots. The mosquitos are out in full force, the air heavy and muggy with a looming thunderstorm, but they couldn’t care less, gathered as they are, waving their prince off down the road.

  “We could’ve taken more cheese,” Malachite drawls, his arms packed full of paper-wrapped wheels of the stuff
.

  “You look ridiculous,” I tease. “Like you’re about to tip over.”

  “Into a bed, hopefully, where I will stay for the rest of the season.”

  “Nonsense,” Fione says as she passes us, cane thumping more easily in the drier mud of the road. “You have work to do. We all do.”

  “Ravenshaunt is twenty-five miles northeast,” Lucien asserts, looking at a half-burned map the headman palmed to him before we left.

  “Should we commandeer a horse? Or four?” Malachite asks, adjusting cheeses so his hand can twitch back toward the blade strapped to his spine.

  “No,” Lucien says. “When we get closer, I can teleport us.”

  “No, you will not,” I start. “Save your energy.”

  Lucien’s eyes grow tired and thin as he looks over at me. “My magic is a tool, Zera. It should be used.”

  “Yes,” I agree lightly. “But not for every little thing. We have legs, Lucien. We can walk.”

  “It would be faster to—”

  “I’m not going to have you lose another hand just because—”

  I bite my tongue too late, and not hard enough. Malachite and Fione go still, the birds in the trees go still, and Lucien makes a clicking sound.

  Malachite starts toward him, cheeses spilling. “Luc, you can’t do this horseshit so lightly—”

  “It’s not horseshit,” Fione says evenly. “It’s magic.” She fixes her gaze on the prince, periwinkle-blue turning icy on the edges. “Which means it’s dangerous. You have to treat it with respect.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “No, you don’t understand,” I interrupt Lucien. “You’re important to us. You’re the one who ties us together—ties the whole fucking country together. Sacrificing parts of yourself to stop Varia faster is not how we do this.”

  “Then, pray tell.” He snarls. “How do we do this? You obviously know better than I.”

  of course we know better. The hunger grows louder, as if it’s echoing his anger. silly young thing, we’ve been fighting before you, shedding blood before you—

  “I don’t know any better,” I fire back. “But this can’t keep going on. You need to get a handle on your magic. You need to understand—watching you throw pieces of yourself away just to stop Varia—”

  “I will do whatever it takes.” His voice turns stony, with none of the vulnerability from the pool last night. “Alone, if I have to.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Malachite scoffs. “I thought we’ve learned our lesson about ‘doing things alone’—”

  “If the four of us are going to stop my sister,” the prince interrupts, “if we’re going to stop who knows how many thousands of raging valkerax, all of us have to be ready. Ready to do anything.”

  He’s made some decision between last night and this morning. I watched his back as he slept, rising and falling in his bedroll in the woods, and I knew his mind was churning. But not in this direction. Our direction.

  “Lucien—” I start.

  “You’re just as bad as she is!”

  It’s a loud, clear voice, burning in the muggy air. Fione, her hair undone, sweat beading her brow and anger flushing her whole face the brightest red. Since the moment Varia touched the Bone Tree, she’s been subdued, tempering herself to keep back the pain. But now it radiates off her like heat waves.

  “If you think sacrificing yourself to stop her is the right thing, then you’re just as bad as she is. Just as fanatic. Just as foolish. Just as short-godsdamn-sighted!”

  Her shrill notes ring. Malachite’s chest deflates, and I can’t look anywhere but at my hands.

  “I don’t want to lose her!” Fione shouts. “I don’t want to lose you, either. I don’t want to lose anyone anymore!”

  I look away with a wince. Fione’s voice fractures, the shards of her anger falling by the wayside as her fists unclench and her eyes water.

  “If the only way to win is by losing, then I don’t want to win at all.”

  human fools, the hunger sneers, burning quieter now. nothing can be gained without something being lost. that is the nature of nature. it is futile to fight it.

  Lucien looks utterly thunderstruck. Malachite’s frozen, Fione panting. Above us, the storm clouds roll out a too-perfect rumble of thunder. The graves. I look up, to the white peaks of the distant Tollmont-Kilstead mountains. All I can think about are the graves, sitting in the snow. Fourteen red ribbons, fourteen iron bells. My steps are tender as I walk up to Lucien’s side. Not touching, but close enough.

  “Is death really a victory?” I ask him softly. “Is sacrifice really something to celebrate? Or something to mourn?”

  Lucien’s head inclines ever so slightly over his shoulder, hawk eyes slicing just the barest part of my neck. Malachite is the first to start walking again, gathering the spilled cheeses up in his arms.

  “Arguing’s better when you walk,” he says. “Gets all the angst out through the legs.”

  Fione finally breaks her gaze from Lucien’s face, and she starts walking after the beneather, cane stabbing the ground with remnant simmering fury. I reach out two fingers to touch Lucien’s hand—the left one. The unmoving one.

  “You—” I swallow. “You’re important. To me.”

  He says nothing, mouth tight and faced away from me.

  “I’m the Heartless,” I say. “I grow back. Let me do the sacrificing, all right?”

  There’s a moment where he pivots, looking as if he’s about to say something. But then his brow furrows. He thinks, tries to open his mouth again. The words are hard. They always are.

  Sometimes, words aren’t needed.

  I squeeze his left hand in mine, and he switches me to his right hand, the one that can squeeze back, and together we walk down the storm-shadowed road.

  Optimistically, I never thought I’d see the Bone Road again. Maybe in the afterlife, in the final fevered death-dream of mine, but not in the flesh. Or the dirt, as it were. The same long twin ruts in the road, the same rabbit dens and long grasses swaying, the same Sunless War mass graves in the distance—graves that will swell to capacity soon—between boggy pools and throngs of fireflies. It’s the same, save for the minor fact that Nightsinger’s forest is missing.

  Though “missing” isn’t the right word. When fire takes something, it takes violently and with scars—visible dark reminders. Swathes of black as far as the eye can see, crisped trunks of only the tallest trees all that’s left. If I squint, I think I can see the stone foundation of Nightsinger’s cabin, but it’s more likely wishful projection. More likely a lump of decaying plant matter. This massive scar, all that’s left of the place I spent three years of my life. Living. Dying. And living again. Fighting my first fight. Dueling my first duel. Learning to love Crav and Peligli, each in their own way. Learning to love Nightsinger, and hate her, and admire her all at once.

  Learning how to live again, without a family. Without humanity. Without a heart.

  Nightsinger and Peligli and Crav left before the fires. Y’shennria promised she’d warn them, and I trust that she did. They’re alive still, somewhere. But the forest is very much dead. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the woodlarks calling to each other, the crackle of branches as animals move through their daily ritual. The breath of the forest.

  Gone.

  The smell is decay and burned things. This is what it feels like to be empty. To miss something you never thought you would.

  Lucien catches my stride as we walk past it. “This…isn’t this it? Varia told me—”

  “Yeah,” I agree quickly.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Why? You didn’t burn it down.”

  “No. But my father did.”

  “Don’t start apologizing for awful parental figures.” I force a smile at him. “Or we’ll be here all day.”


  His snort is faint, but he stays with me every step of the way, until we peel off from the Bone Road entirely and onto a smaller path, and I’m secretly grateful for it.

  As the Ravenshaunt name implies, one sees the ravens first, circling heavy in the sky. And then one sees the ruined parapets, thirty-year-old bleached banners caught between the holes in the mortar and rippling in the wind. Thunderclouds gather like steel wool over the skeleton of the fortress—castle? Keep? I’m not sure what to call it now. All I know is it was once a home. For Y’shennria, for her family.

  Time changes things.

  Even an immortal, magical thrall who never ages.

  “She just said she’d be waiting here for you?” Fione asks.

  “Yeah.”

  Her rosebud lips crinkle. “Where?”

  “All right, yes,” I start cheerily. “It’s a pile of rocks. But maybe there’s a door on it, somewhere.”

  “We should spread out and search,” Lucien agrees. “Mal, take south. I’ll take north. Fione, west, and Zera—”

  “East. Got it.”

  His voice stops us before we can scatter. “Be careful. I think there’s magic here.”

  “What kind?” Malachite quirks a white brow.

  “The waiting kind.”

  It’s ominous, but we have work to do. We peel off, Malachite and me walking the same direction. There’s a beat, and then I smile.

  “First one to find the magic probably perishes.”

  “Cheery thought,” Malachite agrees, and I nudge him.

  “Look on the bright side. There’s a one in four chance I find it and that’s fine. But, I mean, even if you die, Lucien can just make you a Heartless! With me.”

  He shoots me a withering ruby-eyed look. “You seriously don’t know by now?”

  I blink. “Know what?”

  “Have you ever seen a witch with a nonhuman Heartless?”

  “I’ve seen maybe four witches in my life.”

  He sighs. “Only humans can become Heartless.”

  “Oh.” I blink. “Well. That explains a lot.”

  “Does it?” he drawls, pushing me gently away from him. I stumble to a stop in front of the east side, and he turns the corner around half a stone stairwell and is gone.